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Monthly Archives: February 2012

A Kunstierroman is a novel, story, narrative that tends to depict the conflicts of a sensitive youth against the values of a bourgeois system within his or her time. A Kunstierroman is a sub genre of a Bildungsroman, defined as a coming-of-age story, which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood, but it differs as these tales tend to lean generally reflect the moral battle of the artist as they question their appropriate standing as an objective artist. Many Kunstierromans originated in 18th century Germany as the romantic response to the age of enlightenment, and traveled through into 19th century english, gaining more popularity with James Joyces novel “Portrait of the artist as a Young Man”. I plan to read Joyces narrative as a major influence within my own piece. There are two types of Kunstierroman, that story of the ivory tower and the story of the sacred forest. In the ivory towner, the artist locks themselves away from all of humanity sacrificing their life for the creation of their art. While in the story of the sacred forest, the artist equates art with experience, opting instead to create in full participation using history as the tablet for which the artist is inspired by. I plan to use both of these aspects within my own narrative, in which I end up in the sacred forest. The inherited conflict is the impulse driving many Kunstierromen as the protagonist is often a stand in for the artist in the real world. I plan to hide the identity of myself and my peers by creating mannequin-like creatures in which their personalities are personified into animal-like representations. The work of the artist, in the narrative, then becomes a reflection of the artist travels. I want to represent my work as it pertains to the house that my friends and I hold such a strong connection to. Based off the experiences we all shared in Faires House on Tucker Street, I want to re-represent the memories that became so important, the moments in which truly defined us as family rather than mates, I want to show the emergence of myself into the sacred forest. I don’t want the images to be representational, rather I would like to depict them as memories often do, in a surrealistic dance. I want to depict my story as a series of illustrations bound to an accordion style book, all unfolding to create one large composition. As the piece will be presented, I would like the book to sit on a poem, while 4 illustrations hang above the book.